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Angie Lau, CEO, Clover Group

Eight years ago Angie Lau was working in advertising and marketing when her father asked her and her younger sister Emily to join the family bra-making company, Clover Group International, after her brother passed away.

Since then Lau has taken to the intimate-apparel business with a passion, modernizing the Hong Kong company’s operations, doubling capacity and, displaying her background in marketing, launching a company website with funky music mixed with the staccato beat of sewing machines.

For the past eight years Lau’s unlisted Clover has been the largest bra maker for glamorous lingerie line Victoria’s Secret, which is owned by Ohio-based and has annual sales in excess of $6 billion. Clover also makes bras for California-based Inc.’s Gap Body line and for Lane Bryant, which is owned by , New York.

Clover was founded in 1956 by Lau’s father, who was from Southern China. The company started as one lingerie-making factory in Hong Kong with seven sewing machines and 50 employees. Today it has 8,000 employees, four plants in China, one in Cambodia and one in India that is run as a joint venture with three other companies. It makes an average of 2.5 million bras a month, up from 1.2 million when the 52-year-old Lau took over as CEO. Emily Lau serves as chief operating officer and the two sisters own the company equally, their father having since passed away.

While expressing respect for her father’s business acumen Lau is moving with the times, noting that under her management Clover has grown from “a very Chinese-oriented firm to a company with an international outlook,” working with multinational partners from the U.S. to Sri Lanka and India.

“Things are very different from when my father was running” the business, she noted, but added that her legacy is to continue to grow the company the way he would have wanted. She said he taught her to be very focused, which is why she hasn’t ventured into other products, with bras accounting for 95 percent of Clover’s production.

As a member of the second generation, she said, she feels the pressure to “live up to his expectations.”